


Switching Stitches in the Tapestry of Fate

by Infinite_Finals_Week



Series: Fantasy Breakfast Club AU [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Character Swap, Angus as the Director and Lucretia as the Detective, F/F, F/M, Gen, Julia Burnsides Lives, Julia lives but Magnus was still the alien, Light Angst, M/M, Magnus dies though it's like a tradeoff, Merle Highchurch is The Hunger, Some redemption for John, reaper taako
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24550774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infinite_Finals_Week/pseuds/Infinite_Finals_Week
Summary: Istus is pretty sure this wasn't sure how this was supposed to look.Julia, Kravitz, and John find the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet in a cave.Angus feeds journal after journal to Fisher.Taako fastens his feathered cloak and picks up his scythe, ready for another day of reaping.
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans/Lup, Julia Burnsides/Magnus Burnsides, Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone)
Series: Fantasy Breakfast Club AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1826689
Kudos: 21





	Switching Stitches in the Tapestry of Fate

The three of them - Kravitz, Julia, and John - are crouched at the bottom of a well. Julia has a currently unconscious Carey in her arms. There’s a roar from above, unlike any sound that could be made by any sort of dwarf. A brick from the well is shaken loose, and it falls down towards them. It’s only by some sort of miracle that John avoids being hit solidly on the head. They can see the sky, and then they can only see fire as it pours overhead, and all three of them can feel the heat. 

“I don’t really have a cockney accent!” Kravitz shouts over the noise, and his voice switches to something that’s closer to coming out of Fantasy West Virginia. “I faked it!”

“I blame myself for things that happened in my past I couldn’t have had control over!” Julia says, and more tongues of flame lick over the entrance of the well. 

Two sets of eyes flick towards John. “I just met you!” He says, mimicking their panicked tones. “I’m not about to divulge my secrets to people whom I’ve known for no more than two weeks!”

There’s another shriek from outside, and fire curls above their heads again. It doesn’t stop this time. The noise and the heat remain until they are nigh unbearable, and then, just like that, they are gone. 

The thick silence is almost as deafening as the noise was, and the three of them sit in silence for a moment, almost afraid to speak at all. Finally, they do climb out - only to be faced with a blank circle of black glass, stretching for miles without end. 

Kravitz recites a prayer to the Raven Queen. John - a little shocked, maybe - stays eerily silent. Julia, still standing tall above the rest of them, stares around at the nonexistent ruins of a burned town and begins to cry.

* * *

“It’s Lucretia. I’m a reporter for the Neverwinter _Tomes._ Something strange is going on,” Says the young woman, arms crossed over her chest. “And I’m here to find out what it is, and record it.” She pulls a second journal and pen from her bag and flips it open. She doesn’t stop her work on the first, even as she stops looking to glance up at them. “What were your names, again?”

“I’m Leeman Kessler.” John and Kravitz say at the same time. 

The young woman raises an eyebrow at them. Julia has to put her hands over her mouth to try and suppress a giggle. “You’re _both_ named Leeman Kessler?”

“Oh, no! My friend here-,” John gives Kravitz a pat on the cheek that is maybe less than gentle. “Thinks he’s funny. I’m Leeman Kessler. This is Lenny.” John laughs, and they’re very glad for his +8 in deception when he rolls a 7. 

Unfortunately, Lucretia gets a natural 20 on insight. “Try again?” She says, a little too polite. “This time without the bullshit.”

“I’m Julia Burnsides.” Julia says, reaching out a hand. “These two idiots are John and Kravitz. As Istus would have it, the three of us are _also_ trying to figure out what’s going on here. What if you give us your information and we give you ours?”

Lucretia takes her hand and shakes firmly. “I’d be more than happy to make such a deal. Firstly- what do you know about the static?” Julia pales, and Lucretia grins.

* * *

They stand together, and it is for nothing. Sloane’s blood vessels are clearly visible through her skin as silverpoint poison spreads through her body like wildfire. Her arms are wrapped around Hurley, who leans into her as wood slithers around them, almost snakelike. Slone looks at them. She can’t see, not through the pain, but the hazy quality to her eyes makes them all the more striking. 

“Don’t let this happen again.” She says, and then they are no longer flesh and bone. 

Kravitz, soaking wet in the fountain, pulls his legs up to his chest and just stares.The last strands of a rage are slipping through Julia’s mind, and she inhales slowly, stiffly. It’s John who moves first. He’s visibly shaking as he snatches the Sash from the base of the tree and walks back, dropping it into Kravitz’s arms. 

“I’m done.” He tries to snap, but his voice wavers. “I’m done. This was the first time we stood together, the first time all three of us worked hard to fix something, and look where that got us.” He begins to unstrap his weapons and magic items from his body. “Nowhere! It got us absolutely fucking nowhere, because in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter how hard you try or how good your intentions are.” He drops the majority of the items in Kravitz’s lap, tossing a sword at Julia along with an extra pair of mildly enchanted boots. “You two would do yourselves good to learn that. I’m done.”

He wades out of the fountain, and then he is gone, disappearing into the crowd that has begun to form around them. It is all either of them can do to watch, and they return to the Bureau a group member short

* * *

John thinks that Kravitz must be very glad that _Message_ is a cantrip, or he might have died from magical exhaustion by now. His goth friend seems to get no amount of wear out of repeatedly screaming under his breath and sending it at both him and Julia. 

He didn’t mean to end up back with them, especially not on Candlenights, but apparently the reapers of death don’t take holiday breaks. He lets Kravitz fade into the background and closes his eyes.

 _He’s standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down off of the ledge at the broken body of their boy detective. There’s a hand clenched in the back of his jacket. He turns and sees a man who he doesn’t know-except, no- that’s_ Magnus _, how could he forget Magnus, broad-shouldered and auburn-haired, with his wide smiles and bright eyes, except he’s not smiling now. And John can feel himself crying, except-_

He snaps back into his body. The three of them are standing in death’s waiting room, and Kravitz has never looked more overwhelmed in his life. John _knows_ that Kravitz is a devout follower of the Raven Queen, yes, but that does not mean that he needs to express it every six seconds. 

After around three minutes of near-constant yelling, Julia, who had been leaning against the wall, her head in her hands, takes him by the shoulders and shakes him. “Kravitz, focus. We need to figure out how to get out of her before Taako comes back because we’ll be charged with ‘death crimes’. I don’t know what the two of you have done to have died so many times, but you’re dragging me down by association and I’ve been to alive prison. I don’t want to go to ghost prison.”

“I don’t know what I did either- there’s no way I could have died _forty-eight_ times without realising it.” John says. “There must be some kind of mistake in the death legers. I get it, death and taxes, but something’s off somewhere.”

“The Raven Queen isn’t just switched all around by an accidental mistake in divine accounting. Maybe I have died twenty-one times, or something- her deathly majesty-,”

The double doors open in front of them, and in walks the reaper Taako, his cloak of peacock feathers fanning out behind him as he walks. He slinks into the room like he’s not supposed to be there and closes the door behind him. 

The three of them are hushed, staring intently at this elfin man and his strange demeanor. He straightens himself and takes a deep breath. It’s a sharp change from how he acted when he first brought them in, which is off putting, and Julia puts a hand on Kravitz’s shoulder more as a comfort for herself than for him. 

“Do you know Lup?” Taako says. His voice his higher than usual, edged with nervousness. “We have ways of tracking it when known death criminals interact with each other, and it says that the two of you met around half a year back.”

John glances at Kravitz and Julia. “She was that dwarf’s bodyguard, right?”

“ _Gods, of course_!” Julia shouts. “I knew you looked familiar! The two of you, you’re-,”

“Her highness, shut up!” Taako snaps. “Listen, I can’t have you ratting out that Lup and I are related, so here’s the deal: I let you go, and you stay out of my hair and the next time one of you dies, you come hang over here. And for good measure I’ll throw in the freedom of that soul who was in the robot, Roswell? Sounds good? Good.” He pulls a scythe from seemingly nowhere and draws a portal in thin air back to the crystalised lab. 

“Is that where you two were?” John asks. “Because I live in Neverwinter now.” 

“I can’t afford too many unexplainable rifts.” Taako says. “It’s either here or you stay dead with me.”

John sighs and steps through. Kravitz follows without complaint, but Julia stops. “Taako?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell Magnus I love him. And I’m sorry I couldn’t stay, but I ate a grand relic and I have to kind of regurgitate it.” 

Taako laughs, but then he nods solemnly. “Will do.”

* * *

The Fantasy Breakfast Club (as they’d named themselves on the spot when Noelle had asked who they were), are sitting in the Davy Lamp trying to figure out what they’ve learned about Refuge when the ground shakes. 

The three of them lock eyes. “Do you think that’s it?” Kravitz asks, pulling his raven statuette from his pack and turning it over in his hands. 

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” John says. 

Around the room, patrons are looking up, alarmed. The half-elf pianist in the corner stands and addresses them. He sounds almost bored. “Alright, so you’ve got to get under the tables and cover your-,”

Julia runs out the door, with John and Kravitz on her heels. The ground shakes again, nearly knocking them over. The ground begins to crack, splitting apart, and they reach for each other.

The splits widen, and split off towards Kravitz, who takes a few steps backwards, linking hands with John. They crowd in close to each other until they can’t anymore, and the vibrations throw Kravitz off balance, and he falls. Julia catches John by the arm as he falls in, and she clutches at the side of the crack until she can’t anymore, and the three of them plummet downwards.

There’s something about the dying that’s familiar.

* * *

The chunk of static blown out of his memory is unnerving enough that for a minute Kravitz doesn’t realise where he’s been brought. He looks around at the scene around him. It’s the lab on Candlenights, and he and Julia are standing by the door. He sees a crystal fall, sees himself reach out to grab it. 

Issac looks at him. “You could have your arm back. Wouldn’t be hard. Just pull your arm back.” Kravitz looks down at his new arm, a shadowy form with bones clearly visible through his skin. He could live without his arm, technically, but that didn’t mean it was ideal. 

But he could.

* * *

John is next, and he’s brought back to a single moment. He’s standing on stage, explaining the infinite with passion, and the crowd is radiating bad feelings so strongly he can feel it. It’s his first time presenting, he can tell by the crowd, by his slides. 

He can almost feel it now, the emotions, the energy. He’s naturally magically gifted, and the process of converting those feelings into power was practically automatic. He remembers coming home at the end of it and feeling better than he had when he had started. 

And then he had stopped. He had heard what happened to those people who he had drained. They had gone home empty, and it hadn’t gotten better. It left him shaken, and he hadn’t done a lecture since.

“You could be powerful, if you kept going.” Isaac says beside him. “You could become renowned, revered. The most powerful person to ever live, capable of ravaging entire worlds.”

John shakes his head. “Not at the cost of my soul.”

* * *

Julia knows where she’s going to be deposited. 

Hammer and Tongs is a cozy shop, warm and wooden. She sees her father first, and then she and Magnus. 

_Gods, Magnus._

She stares at him. Watches the two of them kiss. 

_I love you, Jules._

Current Julia is crying. Her past self, oblivious and supid (stupid, stupid, how couldn’t she have anticipated that Kalen would come back again) straps the last of her wares to her back and clinks and clatters her way out of the door. Magnus laughs, hearty and so bright. Her past self grins.

She can’t see it when it replays in front of her. She’s doubled over on the floor, head in her hands as her body is wracked with sobs.

 _I love you, Jules._ And then his laugh. 

But- she looks at his blurred outline. He wouldn’t want that. 

She refuses.

* * *

Wonderland is hell. 

Kravitz leans up against the wall of the recovery game, trying to rest his broken foot. Luckily he’s not entirely stupid- he knows how to set broken bones and bandage wounds. Julia, her hair greying and three fingers missing, still stands tall despite the bloody gash in her left arm.

The recovery game is hardly recovering much as compared to what they’re losing. For every sacrifice they get back, they have to sacrifice two more things that Lydia and Edward deem to be of equal value. Julia has her eyesight back, and Kravitz runs his fingers over the holy symbol he’d given up. He doesn’t have much in the way of personal possessions that he carries on him, and so it had seemed the most obvious thing at the time, but the weight in his hands is comforting.

John regains years in exchange for vitality and bad luck, and a door appears in the wall and slides open. They step through into nothingness. They look around, and Julia draws a weapon, expecting this to be another trick of some kind, but nothing comes lunging at them from out of the darkness.

There’s a drawn-out silence. The three of them are too tired to say anything close to witty, and so they resign to remain silent. 

Then the three of them are standing in an enclosed chamber, maybe ten feet square, and in front of them are two liches. They are robed, and the air around them cracks with lightning as they absorb what John identified as necromantic energy earlier. One of them turns to look at them, her hood pulled down. 

It’s Lup. She grins, and the room catches aflame as Lydia and Edward materialise inside.

* * *

“After you headed out, Taako started doing research on whatever shit you all have going on is. Long story short, it’s fucking _insane_.” Lup says, shoving herself up onto one of the various desks littered about she and Barry’s cave. 

“We can’t tell you because you’re alive- it’s complicated. But we can tell you what you need to do.” Says Barry. “Firstly, head on back to your little sky fortress. That’s step one. Secondly, we’ve got-,” He summons an object. “A map of your organization’s headquarters - there’s this spot on the map.”

Julia reaches for it and he hands it over. She stares down at the area of it that’s circled, but she can’t seem to make any sense of where it actually is. She frowns, squinting, as static builds in the back of her throat.

“You’ll have to keep just following the map to get there specifically, because your puny _living brains_ can’t process it properly or whatever. But that’s where you’ll need to get in order to get this whole thing to really pop off.” Says Lup.

“You’ll probably also need some sort of distraction if you want to get there undetected.” Barry starts pointing at specific points on the map. “Part of the reason Taako came over last week - other than Reaper Business and whatever you two have going on -,” He points at Kravitz, who pulls his tattered cloak tighter around him. “Was so that we could get some idea of places that were a little more lax security-wise. Best I can figure, the quickest way to cause a big distraction is to stage some sort of attack on one of these unsecured areas and then high-tail it out of there fast as you can.”

The Fantasy Breakfast Club all nod, and all five of them get to work on a few more hours of planning, and then they call a bubble. None of them know who reached for the other’s hands first. But they held hands the whole way up.

* * *

The Voidfish’s chambers smell as good as they always do when Julia walks down the steps. She opens the door to Ren, sitting on a bench and staring up at the Voidfish. She jumps when the door slides open, but tries for nonchalant when she waves. “Hey, Julia!” She says, voice full of fake cheer. 

Julia walks over and sits down next to her, wraps an arm around her shoulders. “Is there something bothering you?” She asks. 

Ren twists the ends of her braids. “I’m just- just worried. The base basically went into lockdown after that attack earlier. They still haven’t found who attacked and they have no idea why. Could still be in the base now. Things have been getting more and more tense. I can’t believe we didn’t have the solstice festival. And I understand that after the one you just collected, there’s only one left, but I can’t help but feel godsdamn exhausted.”

“Don’t I know it.” Julia says, neglecting to mention how the attacker _is_ in the base, but means her no harm. She laughs, but it’s half-hearted, nothing behind it. “It seems like every time things have started to hit a stride, like you’ve got- a _family_ , almost, everything gets thrown i-,”

Ren lurches forward as she’s struck from behind by something unseen. Julia’s up immediately, sword drawn, and Ren, hunched over, grabs a steak knife from the counter nearby. 

It’s too much. The two of them are powerful, and they fell so many invisible beings, and in the end Ren is overpowered. She’s thrown into the Voidfish’s tank. Cracks spread up the sides until, finally, it breaks open, sending an enormous wave of water into the room. Julia escapes with her life, if only barely. As she slams the door behind her, trailing water into the hallway, she takes a shaky breath and steels her resolve. She tells herself that there will be casualties. That’s the way of a battle. But she cannot help the tears that roll down her face as she steps into the elevator. Julia has never been good at handling casualties. 

* * *

John and Kravitz are standing in the middle of the hallway, frozen in place as Lucretia points her staff at them. “I want to know what’s going on.” She says. “Now.” 

“We don’t- quite honestly, Lucretia?” John says. “We don’t know.”

Lucretia lowers her staff a little, and her expression changes from one of righteous anger into one of confusion and curiosity. “Where are you going? Why are you sneaking around in the director’s private storage space?” 

“He gave us permission?” Kravitz says. His face is scrunched up like he’s in physical pain. John shoves him a little.

“You’re such a bad liar, by the gods.” He says. He pulls the map from his back pocket and hands it to Lucretia, who unfolds it. “We’re looking for this room. And then we’ll call our informants when we get there. We’ll figure out what to do next when it’s time to do it.”

“You could come with us.” Kravitz says. “It would be cool to have someone else here who’s put points into anything except charisma and has an intelligence of above _three._ ”

John shoves him again, harder. “That was uncalled for.”

“I’m not that bad at lying.”

Lucretia points to a corridor. “It looks like we have to go this way.”

* * *

They all end up in Angus’s meeting hall. And then one of them drinks.

* * *

They are stars, and they have thousands of people who know their names, and then they are among the stars, and they are all alone.

There are five of them on the _Starblaster -_ Kravitz, Magnus, Angus, John, and Avi - and they consider themselves lucky as hell that they continue to make it through, cycle after cycle. And they save worlds and they leave them to rot, and they have their fair share of hardships. 

John learns parley, and when he thinks on it, he finds the source of all of the destruction in a kindly old dwarf named Merle Highchurch. For so many cycles, John ends up sitting in the grass of a sprawling garden, trying to find any information he can on Merle and on, as they on the _Starbaster_ have dubbed it, the Overgrowth. 

They drink tea and play chess, and they promise to be truthful. John learns more and more, but even after what feels like so long, there is still a degree to which the small amount he has come to know is equivalent to basically nothing. 

Merle asks if they are friends, and John thinks that if he had been asked that at the beginning of their decades-long mission, he would have explained that in the long run, things like friends don’t matter because there is such a long way that time stretches, and that when it comes down to it, they are nothing, and that they don’t matter.

But he’s been on this mission for so long. He has gotten attached, and the idea of the infinite, the answer to the end, will always lie in the back of his mind. But he has gotten to learn how to appreciate the smallest moments with his crew, the quiet moments when they are okay. And so John tells Merle that yes, they are friends. 

This seems to catch Merle off-guard. Merle tells him that he is different than most people he has met, that people are dreary, that they do not care for the simplest things in life. They fight, because John has met so, so many people in his long life, and he has seen so much love for things like fine china, photography, so much compassion for life that just watching these people leaves a dull ache in his chest. 

They do not speak again, after that.

* * *

Angus watches them split the light, and they all watch the world die beneath them. There is such violence, and in the end he can’t stand it anymore. He decides that he’ll find the relics himself, and that he’ll find some way to destroy them, no matter how much it takes. But he knows that his crewmates will not approve. So he makes it so they have no reason to, and tells himself that once he has enacted his plan, he will bring them back.

He overestimates, he thinks, how well he can take care of himself, how well he can do things. He is talented, and strong, and so smart, but as it turns out, there aren’t a lot of people willing to take a thirteen-year old into the forest to go adventuring, even if that thirteen-year-old insists that he is, in fact, one-hundred and fourteen. He finds Kravitz’s relic by himself, but he loses twenty years off his life, and he doesn’t actually retrieve the relic. He keeps looking, so far and for so long. 

He had expected to end up with John, Kravitz, and _Magnus._ Julia wasn’t something he anticipated. It was like a knife to the gut to learn that Magnus was dead, and there was a part of him that almost instinctively tells him that it’s time to get the _Starblaster_ and go, He could bring Magnus back, except he has worked so hard to do this.

And there are people here now who he loves, who have become a sort of second family after he erased the first one. So Angus doesn’t actually do anything at all.

* * *

There’s outrage, panic, more outrage, at the revelation of a century’s worth of memories. Julia, Lucretia, Carey, and Killian, have no real idea of what the others have just remembered, but there is a sort of sharpness in the way Kravitz’s voice echoes around the room. 

And there is a crash from the ceiling. 

They fight through hordes of clinging vines, of plants with needle-thin thorns. 

Avi flies their good ship.

They battle, and they are so powerful. They are one unit, all bonds.

Angus casts up a barrier, and they protect him. 

And,

Istus permitting, 

They win.


End file.
